


under glass air

by duchamp



Category: DCU, Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 00:56:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11325315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchamp/pseuds/duchamp
Summary: Steve offers her his hand. She takes it. “When you need me,” he says, “I’ll find you.”





	under glass air

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bonfire coils and lurches,  
big as a house, and then it settles.

STEPHEN KUUSISTO

 

 

 

Someone is about to come but doesn’t. Is about  
to turn on the stairs but doesn’t.

VINDA KARANDIKAR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i.

There’s a tally of things Diana knows; as sure as she knows she’s tempered as the earth’s crust, as a goddess, as Zeus’ own blood and bone.

The first is the measure of a sword in her hand, the weight of the steel. The second: the reassuring clasp of the cuffs around her wrists, which she hardly ever removes. The third is her aunt’s headdress, an honor to wear, an impossible moniker to emulate. The fourth, her mother’s embrace. The fifth, Steve’s kiss. (The sixth: that she’ll outlive those she holds dear, her acquaintances, her human charges.)

They ground her, keep her.

Build her and hold her together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ii.

“I’m very happy,” Etta says, sincere to a fault, the shoulder Diana has leaned on coming on close to a year, “that he brought you here. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that.”

And Diana nearly tells her that she’s never had to, that what they’ve shared—a life, joint pensions, an apartment, suffragette marches with women who Diana’s felt are as much kindred spirits to her as her fellow Amazons on Themyscira—speaks for itself. But, sometimes, certain feelings need to be voiced, need to be spoken out loud. (His arms around her were enough, his fingers trailing on her cheek. He still said, “I love you.”)

“Well, I’ve found a home,” Diana responds, instead. Then, trying to bring some lightness, some levity—“You’ll never get rid of me.”

Etta laughs. It’s always been one of the single, best sounds Diana’s ever heard. “Wouldn’t want to.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

iii.

“What is it?” Steve asked, concerned, prodding, as their boat rocked back and forth along the ocean’s waves. They were nearing their second night together on the confined raft, bellied by water turning a reddish-black hue in the moonlight. The color reminded Diana of the plum trees which grew outside her bedroom window at home.

“I’ve never gone an entire day without seeing my mother,” she admitted, and her fingers itched to set the bow back, doubting, just a little, what she was doing. How would she survive in a new, strange place? Let alone find a way to help those living there? To defeat a titan such as Ares? She was still a child, in many ways. She was still a child, and she missed her mother.

Steve opened his mouth as if to say something, maybe a personal anecdote, but stopped himself. Worked his jaw. Inched closer to where they were sitting side by side. “Change is hard,” he stated, short, to the point. He swallowed, and Diana could only imagine all that he was not sharing. “It will get easier.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

iv.

She’s a secretary, as Etta is, to a decorated colonel. He’s retired from the military, trekking the infinitely complex world of politics instead. Parliamentary hearings, meetings with foreign dignitaries, formal dinners with so many donors—who bring in the founding for elections, who offer coffers lined with old money.

What she does—setting up appointments, typing memos, taking lunch orders, organizing daily schedules down to the minute—is considered ‘women’s work.’ Appropriate for her sex but, even then, one acquaintance of Etta’s (a Candy family friend, greying and bespectacled, staunched in ways from the last century) declares, at a social gathering, that a secretarial position is, “Quite masculine in certain respects,” and, “Not entirely appropriate.”

To which Diana responds, even toned, polite as possible, “That depends on how you define a woman.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

v.

A god’s gifts are infinite, and Diana discovers a new aspect in her well of powers every passing day.

The one ability that’s the most tempting to use, that’s the most dangerous, is creating her own reality. A world catering to individual use, a synthetic expanse containing her hopes and desires come to life. (Ares had constructed something similar, before; a paradise rising with a field of green, to lure her to his side.)

The scene is this: a cottage house on the beach, right by the ocean, in a place that looks like a hybrid of both Themyscira and the man’s world. There are potted plants seated along the path leading to the front door. Tea on the stove. Diana’s sword and shield resting uniformly against a wall. And to her left, doors down, a baby coos.

“She’s up,” Steve says, coming from behind her, slipping his arms around her waist. He smells like powdered milk and fresh soap, like lavender and warm sunshine. “Do you know where The Tale of Peter Rabbit is? I can’t find it. She’ll only go to sleep if I read her that one.”

“On the shelf above the stove,” Diana answers.

A quick kiss, settled into the tangle of curls which hang loose and draped over her shoulder. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

vi.

The first time, she wandered into him by accident. Week stretching on for far too long, a backlog of paperwork on her desk, and Etta sick with the flu. It was cold compresses and lemon and porridge, the colonel ringing her up to demand why this task or that task wasn’t completed.

She’d taken a moment to herself, sat back in the rocking chair by the window. It was raining outside, dreary, pitter-patter on the glass nearly singing her to sleep. Only she found her mind wandering, herself drifting from one point of origin to the next, weightless, and—

“Diana.” He was whole and unharmed, her name on his tongue unhurried and buoyant, like they had all the time in the world. A set of ties, one in each hand—muted neutrals with different weaves—he inquired, “Which one?”

“Steve?” Ash in her mouth. She couldn’t swallow.

Seemingly unaware of her confusion, he repeated the question. Then, “I’ve never thought myself entirely hopeless at this. But, please, angel.”

Silent, she pointed to the tie in his right.

He nodded his thanks, went to arrange it around his neck. “Day one impressions,” he muttered, “the most important. I’ll be back by six and we’ll—”

The honking of cars from congested London evening traffic caused Diana to jolt, aware again of reality. She sharply stood, rocker groaning underneath her. Looked down, out onto grey streets. Trying to ground herself, to trace what had happened.  

She hadn’t been asleep.

She hadn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

vii.

“Where do you go?” Etta asks.

“Sorry?” There’s smudged ink on her thumb, pressing down a postage stamp onto the latest envelope containing a letter to Chief. The other two, addressed to Sameer and Charlie, are set aside, already dressed and sealed. 

“Sometimes I see you drift. Travel somewhere else.” Etta taps Diana’s forehead with a gentle finger. “To other worlds, I think, in here.”

She can’t lie. But, at the same time, she doesn’t know how to articulate exactly where she goes, what she’s doing. How it’s a temptation that beckons more often than it should. How she really needs to stop. “Daydreaming,” Diana says.

Etta cocks her head.

“The sea. A beach house.” That’s not all.

But it seems to be enough for Etta. Or, if it isn’t, she doesn’t push for more; simply admitting, “Mine is a drink with Douglas Fairbanks,” with a wink and a smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

viii.

His grave rests at Brookwood.

A memorial plaque marking a mound of earth covering nothing. No body. Yet, a series of three lines are thinly etched: _Steven Rockwell Trevor. 1886-1918. Beloved Son & Brother. _

Son, brother—two roles Diana had never seen him fill, ones she attempted to parse in the aftermath. She’d tried getting a hold of his father. But the man had wanted nothing to do with her, preferring instead to bury himself in his professorship at West Point. (There was talk of Diana’s importance to his son—‘They couldn’t possibly be married, of course, Steven never informed his mother and I of a girl. So, please, Ms. Candy, stop placing these calls on her behalf. I have no desire to speak to someone who only had an assuredly brief tryst with my boy.’)

Steve’s mother was a different story, a regal socialite who resided in a brownstone on East 6th Street in New York. She’d written Diana, sent her own condolences. That’s how Diana learned about Sarah; the lost little sister, the hidden pain. Polio, one of the letters read. Gone at sixteen. (From the eighth paragraph of the fourth sent: _They were terribly close, you know._ _Ten years difference between them and he dotted on her._ _If I’m being honest, I think she was what tethered him to New York, in the end. He never did take well to our life here. He left soon after she passed._ )

The fuller picture Diana was granted made her grief sharper, made her… angry, of all things. Feeling cheated. Being offered the context to a life, to a past, that Steve should have had the chance to share with her, if he’d wished to.

She’d wanted—still wants—to share everything with him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ix.

She’s three feet tall. Blonde hair and blue eyes, takes after her father. On her belly, sprawled on sandy dunes, fingers supporting a model airplane. Her index keeps a steady line on the wing.

Steve is crouched next to her. “And where does the plane go?” He asks, gesturing to the wooden structure.  

“Up,” their daughter says, and tilts the nose to the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

x.

From the first paragraph of one of the letters Diana never sends to his mother: _I knew him for only a handful of days. But I loved him just as fiercely as if I had known him for years._

(For each piece of correspondence that’s mailed, there’s another that joins a stack on her desk; to stay unseen, unread by anyone else but her.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

xi.

“Can you—” She was desperate, beyond the unbearable longing in her chest, fit to straining, beyond the heat in her abdomen. Directing, curvature at his head, a hold there, griping light as she could at his hair, said, “More to the…” Trailed off, because he followed where she led before she even finished her request.

Mouth at her cunt, cheek brushing the inside of her thighs. A wisp of something she couldn’t define. One finger, two, tongue flat and she was finally finding the edge.

When she sighed, came down gently and nearly silent, he looked to her. The snow was still falling outside, there was canon fodder sounding in the din, the ‘evening hate’ as Chief had called it; when they were warming themselves by fire lit above wet, sinking mud and surrounded by tented tarps. “You’re beautiful,” Steve said, and it didn’t translate so much as a compliment in the way he spoke but as a simple statement of fact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

xii.

His wallet she finds on the second anniversary of his death. Tumbling about the shoe closet in her and Etta’s apartment, aimless, rifling through boxes containing his personal affects. She’d never gone through them before—the last time she tried her body clogged up with a sense of absolute dread and she couldn’t breathe; heaving dry and Etta finding her curled into herself when she came home from running errands.

The squared, weathered leather, when she inspects it, flips back to reveal a thin, silver clip containing £10, an innocuous note reading, _App. at bistro 2:30_ , and a picture; teal, grain patched, cindered at the top edge. It’s Steve—no older than eighteen, boyish and stoic—posing with a younger girl on his lap—seven or eight at most, ringlets and lace and striking eyes boring into the camera’s lens.

“Sarah,” Etta explains to Diana, when she’s shown. “I’d actually tried catching up at the train station the morning the both of you left London. He’d forgot his wallet. And he’d always have her picture with him. That’s why it’s burned.” She points to the blackened corner of the photograph. “It was nearly lost when he was in battle at Lys.” Etta’s lower lip trembles, continuing, “When you’re looking after someone, with someone as long as I was with him, taking care of them in a way, you start to notice things like that. And I know I shouldn’t, I know it’s no one’s fault, but I’ve always felt unbearably guilty. So guilty, that he didn’t have this with him when he… when he died.”

Diana doesn’t try to reassure Etta, knows that whatever she says won’t hold much sway on the still present grief and guilt. But she says, softly, the only comfort she can conjure, “She was with him.” Pointing to her heart, hand over her chest, stating, “She was right here.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

xiii.

The golden coils, the braided thread, glowing incandescent—a tool she thought she needed, in the beginning. Ares had used it for the task of creation, hand at the base, the entirety of it looped around him. The result: expanding landscapes, vivid color and quiet and tempting calm. But, when Diana put her mind to it, following her gut, following her deepest ache, it all fell into place.

Lasso or no lasso, the beach would come to her. The house on its shores. Steve.

And a child who grew in front of her eyes, though not dependent on the constraints of the passage of time, who was the spitting image of her father.

 

 

 

 

 

 

xiv.

“Your voice brought me back.” She’s speaking to emptiness in the now-sleeping world, to pitch-black hallows. Comforter turned down, lying straight against it. Staring at the ceiling, unseeing, really, because in her mind, in her construct, she’s standing at salt water’s edge.

“You haven’t gone anywhere,” Steve counters. He sounds slightly confounded, as he always is when she attempts a dialogue about reality. When she carries the war long gone and London and her life without him into this sanctuary. When she so much as alludes to it. But he’s never impatient or demanding. He waits for an explanation.

“There was—” You left me. You died. This planet—I wanted to tear the seams of it apart. “I forgot myself, for a moment. But then I closed my eyes, and there you were.”

Steve offers her his hand. She takes it. “When you need me,” he says, “I’ll find you.”

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to [blueincandescence](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence) for looking over this and offering her invaluable advice and encouragement! 
> 
> Find me on [Tumblr](http://highsmith.tumblr.com/).


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